The Deserted Village

In the poem, Goldsmith criticises rural depopulation, the moral corruption found in towns, consumerism, enclosure, landscape gardening, avarice, and the pursuit of wealth from international trade.

The poem was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also provoked critical responses, including from other poets such as George Crabbe.

[3] The poem is dedicated to the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, with whom Goldsmith was a close friend and founding member, along with Samuel Johnson, of a dining society called The Club.

This was a subject that Goldsmith had addressed in his earlier poem The Traveller; or a Prospect of Society (1764), which also condemned the corrupting influence of extreme wealth.

Goldsmith also set out his ideas about rural depopulation in an essay entitled "The Revolution in Low Life", published in Lloyd's Evening Post in 1762.

In "The Revolution in Low Life", Goldsmith had condemned the destruction of a village within 50 miles (80 km) of London in order to construct a fashionable landscape garden.

After nostalgic descriptions of Auburn's parson, schoolmaster and alehouse, Goldsmith makes a direct attack on the usurpation of agricultural land by the wealthy: The poem later condemns the luxury and corruption of the city, and describes the fate of a country girl who moved there: Goldsmith then states that the residents of Auburn have not moved to the city, but have emigrated overseas.

He describes these foreign lands as follows: The poem mentions "wild Altama", perhaps a reference to the "Altamaha River" in Georgia, an American colony founded by James Oglethorpe to receive paupers and criminals from Britain.

In its use of a balanced account of Auburn in its inhabited and deserted states, and in its employment of an authorly persona within the poem, it conforms to contemporary neoclassical conventions.

[14] The Deserted Village condemns rural depopulation, the enclosure of common land, the creation of landscape gardens and the pursuit of excessive wealth.

[18] Sebastian Mitchell has argued that Goldsmith employs "deliberately precise obscurity" in the poem, concealing the reason for the village's demise.

[20] However, Bell also argues that commerce is clearly the "arch-villain of the piece", and it is the riches that a small minority have accumulated from international trade that allow rural people to be displaced from their lands so that country estates can be created.

[22] Mitchell also argues that criticism which focuses solely on the poem's historical accuracy misses its wider commentary on late-eighteenth-century social issues, particularly the question of "urban estrangement".

Thomas Bewick and his school also produced several depictions of scenes from The Deserted Village, some of which occurred as illustrations of published versions of the poem or Goldsmith's works.

An engraving of his edition of Fables of Aesop, published in 1818, features a scene depicting a quotation from the poem carved into a rock.

[30] The painter Francis Wheatley submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1800, both of which depicted scenes from The Deserted Village.

Political radicals, such as Thomas Spence and John Thelwall quoted The Deserted Village in their own works, as did a number of other writers.

[35] Sebastian Mitchell states that some modern critics have seen the poem as appearing at a turning point in British culture, when public social and political opinions, and private emotional dispositions, diverged.

[37] In the United States, a different reading occurred—while the English Auburn may have been deserted, the new world offered opportunities for the recreation of Goldsmith's idyll.

In 1770, for instance, Thomas Comber argued that the population of rural England was not decreasing, and that enclosure could increase farmers' demand for labourers.

A single line from The Deserted Village is inscribed on the plinth of a statue of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Saxon Dress.